A little more than a week from today, the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, will open its MOWAA Institute, the first building to be completed of a planned 15-acre campus that will also include a contemporary art exhibition space (the Rainforest gallery), among other facilities. The complex is expected to be completed in 2028.
In advance of the opening, Antiquity magazine has published an updated report on pre-construction archeological investigations conducted at the Institute’s building site and that of the Rainforest gallery. Running from 2022 to 2024, the MOWAA Archeological Project was a collaboration among MOWAA, the British Museum, and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), with Cambridge Archaeological Unit and Wessex Archaeology acting as delivery partners.
The city of Benin lies atop the ruins of Edo, capital of the powerful Kingdom of Benin (ca. CE 1200–1897). A precolonial empire that at its height had a sophisticated political structure, a vast trading network, and an advanced artistic culture, it is best known for its bronze sculptures and reliefs. The kingdom’s resistance to becoming a British protectorate in the 1880s eventually resulted in a British military raid; the city’s royal palace was destroyed and its art treasures, including thousands of bronzes, were looted.
The archeological investigation, which focused on the royal palace complex, was the first to be conducted since the 1960s. It included both excavations and non-invasive strategies like ground-penetrating radar. Radiocarbon dating of the artifacts revealed that they spanned the period before the establishment of the Benin Kingdom through its collapse and subsequent colonial and postcolonial eras.
The new MOWAA Institute will be a center for research, storage, conservation, and display of archaeological finds, as well as a home for repatriated objects like Benin bronzes.
